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[15] johannes voelz utopias of transnationalism and the neoliberal state in 2008, david gutiérrez and Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo collected fourteen articles for a special issue of American Quarterly on the topic “Nation and Migration.” In many ways, this issue is representative of the debate on transnationalism as it now dominates U.S.-based American studies. The special issue is subdivided into four sections: “Citizenship and State Power,” “Transnationalism,” “Migrant Experiences,” and “Writing Migration.” The fact that “transnationalism” is treated here as a subsection, set alongside “Citizenship and State Power,” is indicative of the American studies version of the debate. Transnationalism and state power, one concludes from this design, are two distinct phenomena. In this paper I will explore the problems arising from this founding distinction, and I will argue that what transnational American studies lacks so far is precisely an adequate framework to address the role of the state and its changing properties in the global era when talking about transnationalism. Turn this phrase around, and the problem becomes even more pressing: The question of whether cultural transnationalism (understood as the border-crossing flow of cultures and peoples, and secondarily also of goods) may have a function in the realignment of the nation-state under the conditions of neoliberal globalization (characterized by the whole gamut of the rise of the transnational corporation , the emergence of global governance regimes, and the structural reorganization of the nation-state by such measures as deregulation, the concentration of power in the executive branch, the outsourcing of executive functions, and the limiting of citizenship rights) is rarely even considered. In other words, I argue that many American studies practitioners share an unspoken consensus that the politico-institutional transformations associated with globalization are related no more than indirectly to the cultural transnationalism that is the field’s chief concern. The point of my critique is not simply to make an appeal to bring the state back into American studies analyses; rather, my reconceptualization of the interrelatedness between the globalized neoliberal order and cultural transnationalism is meant to make Utopias of Transnationalism and the Neoliberal State [357] us look at transnationalism with a different set of questions in mind. Rather than asking whether and to what degree transnational formations constitute successful moments of resistance against nationalism, American exceptionalism , and (neoliberal) imperialism, I propose to look at the interdependencies between what is commonly called globalization from above (neoliberal global corporatism) and globalization from below (anti-imperial flows of culture across national boundaries), and investigate the cultural resources that have enabled the spread of both of these strands of globalization. If we divest ourselves of the urge to interpret the transnational as resistant and subversive, and instead examine the links as well as the fissures between both dimensions of globalization, we realize that cultural studies of transnationalism need to address a set of questions that differs quite radically from the questions we are fond of asking in Amercian studies. They include the following: How is transnationalism linked to the culture of consumption that is driving neoliberal globalization? If transnationalism cannot be conceptualized as a simple antithesis to late-capitalist globalization, what makes neoliberal reforms culturally appealing in the first place? How does mobility become encoded in transnationalism, and how does this encoding interact with the program of neoliberalism? I will address these questions in no more than a speculative and provisional manner in the final section of this chapter . Underlying my appeal to change our perspective in this manner is the conviction that the pervasive late-capitalist transformation of our world cannot simply be explained as an effect of an entrenched power structure that victimizes ordinary people. Rather, if culture enables and expresses the ways in which individuals and communities respond to changing conditions (be they social, economic, or political), and thereby feeds back into these conditions, the most pressing problem for transnational American studies would be to find explanations for why we have welcomed (though it may be painful to admit) late-capitalist globalization in to dominate our world. I To begin my critique of the current state of transnational American studies, I want to ask why transnationalism is so frequently framed as a cultural phenomenon related to the nation-state, as well as to neoliberal globalization, in an oppositional manner. As Winfried Fluck (2007) has argued, American studies resembles most disciplines in the humanities in that, throughout its history, it has been preoccupied with investigating possibilities of resistance. Throughout the last fifty years, this space of...

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